A Voice From the South Essay Example

In A Voice from the South, Anna Julia Cooper sets up a dichotomy between two distinct points of view: on the one hand, the "Stranger" of the skeptical and scientific traditions. On the other hand, the person of faith. It is possible to find a middle ground between her two points of view. The first question we can ask ourselves is whether science and religion are compatible with each other or not. That is if one and the other can coexist or necessarily the one excludes the other and between them, there can only be an inevitable conflict. It is not uncommon to find, even today, the sometimes-widespread opinion that science and religion are mutually incompatible and the relationship between them has always been a source of inevitable conflicts.

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After the Second World War, there was a change in these positions. On the one hand, the scientist euphoria that had favored the idea of incompatibility and the inevitable conflict between science and religion began to be abandoned. From the limitless admiration of science, it was passed to a more critical look and even to a certain distrust, caused by the danger to some of its consequences (Giles 625). On the other hand, new historical studies have shown that many of the arguments used by Draper and White do not have a serious historical basis. The relationships between science and religion throughout history have been complex and cannot be reduced to those of their absolute incompatibility and continuous conflict. Numerous studies of the historical type in recent years, which touch on such delicate issues as the Galileo and Darwin eras, have shown quite clearly that not only the necessary conflict nor the continuous harmony reflect the complex relationships between science and religion. These are two autonomous visions of the world among which a fruitful dialogue must be established and which can be considered as complementary. Some authors have sought a certain integration between the two, but this is more problematic.

When confronted with the universe, and try to give an answer to the questions that are asked about its nature and origin, man adopts different points of view, which today we can separate as scientific, philosophical and theological. Today these views are more or less separated, but for a long time, they were mixed. Even today, despite not being recognized many times, these views are confused on issues that inadvertently cross the borders that we have established between them (Harrison 25). Regarding these issues, questions that cross the border to philosophy and even to theology continue to arise and are one of the most important fields in the relationship between science and religion. An important problem is to consider the conceptions that man has had of the nature and origin of the universe throughout history and the image that current science gives us of them today, and to see how they relate to what religions tell us on the same subject. The problem has to do with the relationships that are established between the world and the divinity in each religious thought.

Eastern traditions participate in a certain pantheism and imanentism, in which the separation between the world and the divinity is blurred in a conception in which the last reality is unitary. In them is the idea of an eternal, cyclical universe that lately has its foundation in a last omnipresent and unknowable principle, beyond being and non-being, either Brahma or Tao, with which it finally identifies itself. There is no true concept of creation, but the universe itself is like an extension of what we can consider as the realm of the divine and not different from it. The ideas of unity and change play an important role, since the universe is at the same time eternally changing and the same, that is born, develops, dies and are reborn and that is not different from the divine principle with which it is identified and whose avatars are manifested in nature.

Among the different methods of comparing science and theology, which is most likely to be overcome because it is now inadequate, there is the first way - the most naive one, which, although often criticized, is still, in fact, followed as if it were entirely correct both those who stand in favor of faith and theology and those who want to show their inconsistency - is that of concordism. The concordism can take different forms, more or less sophisticated, but in its substance consists in the attempt to establish automatic correspondences and between the statements of some scientific theories and the statements contained in the biblical revelation, or in other written religious traditions, or even, on the contrary, in the atheistic theses. The matching-identification between the big bang of scientific cosmology and the biblical fiat lux is now classic, to cite just one example. It is certainly suggestive, spontaneous, to attempt such juxtapositions, but one cannot claim to have demonstrated correctness, if only because there is no ground on which to learn to conduct such a demonstration

Inevitably, in addition to questions about the method by which to make the comparison, there are also often additional complications due to an inadequate knowledge of scientific theories by philosophers and theologians, on the one hand, as to an absolutely erroneous use of theological terminology by of some scientists. To give just one example, we equate the term creation, mechanically speaking the creation as a simple "start" of the machine of the universe, thinking that if the universe were devoid of an origin over time it would not take any creation and therefore it would be useless the action and the very existence of God. Moreover, what physicists call "empty" is often identified with what philosophers and theologians call "nothing". All this has also led internationally renowned scientists to support the extremely superficial thesis according to which the models of the universe having their "origin" in a quantum fluctuation of the void are thus emerged "from nothing", and therefore exclude the presence of a Creator. In any case, in the course of history, this concordist attempt, in fact, has never given good results. First of all because it is almost always methodologically flawed, because it is too often driven by an ideological prejudice: that of trying to prove a thesis, theist or atheist, already assumed a priori, exploiting in some way both the science and the content of revelation. Secondly, because both the scientific theories and the methods of written hermeneutics, being hypothetical, evolve, leaving the concordist theses, therefore, always in precariousness.

It is, therefore, necessary a more rigorous terrain for a confrontation, which does not give too much space to preconceptions but is based on a demonstrative rationality. In this regard, it seems possible to find, in some of the epistemological problems emerging from the most recent scientific research, some lines on the basis of which science, philosophy, and theology, rather than seeking points of agreement. They can and must collaborate, each with its own method, to the construction of an epistemology, of a logic, and of an extended axiomatics, that both science and theology can use as a common basis for their demonstrations. As for the world of science, first of all, moving on the terrain of the problem of the foundations of his theories; as regards the world of philosophy and theology, moving in the search for a renewed systematicity, based on demonstration methods, as far as possible, as well as descriptive.

An expansion of scientific rationality, therefore, which in a certain way overcomes the univocal scheme of Galilean mathematics and sciences - without intending to exclude these latter - by opening up to that analogical approach that for an authentic philosophy and a systematic theology has always been fundamental and that they are able, with their language, to formulate more rigorously (Harrison 5). Today this approach seems less remote than a few decades ago, especially by some sectors of the sciences that are deeply reviewing their way of proceeding, driven by an intrinsic need for maturation. We are witnessing a gradual approach of the sciences to problems that are, in a proper sense, ontological and which must be dealt with by demonstrative methods and not just descriptive and with a language that can be recognized as scientific.

A second way, undertaken in the past, today to be overcome, that of the concordism is not the other side of the coin, is that which establishes an absolute parallelism (others say independence) between science and theology, considered as two tracks without any possibility of meeting and the agreement, or conflict. It is the choice, apparently, more convenient to avoid the repetition of unpleasant incidents that further mark the story after the Galilean question. It is stated that the disciplines have different methods (and this is true, for which they enjoy reciprocal autonomy) and are "incommensurable" among themselves (and this is not correct because there are also common foundational aspects), so their conclusions should not be compared. The affirmation of an autonomy of method is right, but is not the excessive affirmation of total incommensurability perhaps excessive? Do we risk to rely on the doctrine of the double truth and therefore of no truth? A way of proceeding that easily agrees with today's philosophical relativism. The consequence is necessarily the negation of every cognitive value both to scientific and theological knowledge, it is absolute instrumentalism. In this case, the comparison is excluded a priori.

The novelty that appears today with greater evidence seems to lie in the fact that the same logical, mathematical, computer science, physical and chemical sciences, not to mention biological ones, seem to require broader foundations, but no less rigorous, to be able to face their own objects, gradually more complex and structured. In particular, that reductionist epistemology appears to be completely inadequate, which, in the line of experimental sciences, wants biology ultimately brought back to chemistry, chemistry to physics. In the line of the formal sciences already with the publication of Godel's theorems, this insufficiency had been demonstrated in order to Russell and Whitehead's project to reduce arithmetic to logic (Carroll 1). The main problem, then, no longer appears to be that of conquering a dominance of the sciences on theology, or vice versa, or that of defending one's own land, but rather that of identifying common ground, a sort of common alphabet on the which to build together a founding meta-science both for the sciences and for theology. The problem is, therefore, that of a demonstrative set-up of the ontological foundations of the sciences. It is a philosophical problem to which today the sciences have arrived from within them.

Conclusion

Among the different methods of the comparison between science and theology, which are now to overcome because inadequate, a first way - the most naive one that, although often criticized, still comes, in fact, followed as it was completely correct, both from those who stand in favor of faith and theology who want to show their inconsistency from those who want them - is that of concordism. The concordism can take different forms, more or less sophisticated, but in its substance consists in the attempt to establish correspondences between the statements of some scientific theories and the statements contained in the biblical revelation, or in other traditions, or also, on the contrary, in the atheistic theses. The matching-identification between the big-bang of scientific cosmology and the biblical fiat lux is now classic, to cite just one example. It is certainly suggestive, spontaneous, and in a certain sense it may also be legitimate to attempt such juxtapositions,...